Daniel Negreanu Unhappy about Seating Scripts in Online Poker

Daniel Negreanu is mainly known for his live poker accomplishments. But he also plays online poker too. And Negreanu’s recent internet poker session had him angry about seating scripts.

Negreanu sat down at empty $50/$100 no-limit hold’em tables to work on his skills. And he noticed that players were joining his table, then immediately leaving whenever he left.

“As soon as I sat down, the table filled immediately, within three-quarters of a second,” Negreanu said via YouTube.

“Obviously with me, these guys have a big advantage, or at least a perceived big advantage, because this is their regular game and I’m not strong at those because I don’t play.”

Seating scripts are programs that online poker players use to track the most-profitable tables. When these programs find a good table, the user will join and play against inferior/less-experienced competition.

But seating scripts actually backfired for the players in this instance. Negreanu said that he’s been learning some new things from his coaches. He won $30,000 in his first session, and another $10,000 in his next session.

Nevertheless, he didn’t like how players were clearly using seating scripts to hunt him.

What’s being Done about Seating Scripts?

PokerStars has been trying to deal with their scripts problem since 2014. But they haven’t had much success in ending this practice.

Negreanu did discuss how PokerStars is doing some new things with their lobby seating to limit the problem.

“One of the ways that they’re doing that is a new system for seating tables,” he said. “So right now, you can go into the lobby and you can just see what game is going, 5/10 [for example], I wanna play in that game with that guy. That won’t be the case anymore.”

Hopefully Negreanu’s rant will help inspire a fix to something that’s plagued internet poker for a while. You can see him talk about seating scripts beginning around 18:30 below.